After seeing and hearing some positive feedback about ReviewMe I recently decided that it would be worth it for me to dabble in getting a few reviews for my ebook, seo tools, and seo glossary. Rae recently reviewed ReviewMe, stating:

The site brought me a couple hundred visitors initially, which was a little below my expectations. But, it has continued sending visitors daily since the review launched (and yes, it has long been off the main page now, this site blogs several entries per day). Those visitors have also made the site money.

The site I had reviewed was given two links to the homepage with the site name as the anchor. The review was close to 300 words and they also added our logo to the review (which was also linked for a third link to the homepage from the review page). The blogger clearly stated that he was paid to review the site, but that all of the opinions about the site were his own and that only his time to review the site, not his thoughts *about* the site had been paid for.

I have not tracked sales from most of my ReviewMe reviews (because I do not generally track that granular), but John Chow put up affiliate links in his review of my ebook, and I can tell you that his review paid for itself the first day.

Ideally there would be a small bit of text, icon or graphic that would bring me back to the top of the document, at the end of every word might get a little distracting so adding one in between every letter would be OK. I also might think about adding a page only search box, pre-populated with terms from the page just to make navigating it a bit easier. Use a bit of fancy Javascript to use predictive filling.

Paul Stamatiou reviewed my glossary. In the review he both talked up SEO, and gave my glossary the thumbs up:

I had some SEO work done on this site in the summer and within a few weeks my traffic went from a daily average of 2,500 unique visitors to roughly 4,000 unique visitors per day. Those extra visitors are all from search engines. An optimized site can help your blog, portfolio or whatever your site hosts, rank higher on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), and beyond. ... The glossary is extremely useful and has already earned a bookmark in my browser, and I only bookmark things I use - the rest get sent to my del.icio.us. I would like to see an offline version of the glossary as well. Perhaps a nicely styled PDF that gets updated every month or so.

Imagine a trusted voice with thousands of subscribers highlighting your industry, highlighting your website, and offering useful constructive criticism that will help you further improve your offering. Is it possible for ads to have any greater value?

Because I have been involved with ReviewMe, many people have told me that they thought ReviewMe was just an SEO tool, but I realize that links / rankings / SEO in general / brand building / trust building / sales are all just a side effect of getting exposure and satisfying market needs. The benefit of reviews from a network like ReviewMe is that you get exposure in active channels that people trust and are paying attention to.

Comments

I think staying under the radar is one way of looking at marketing (especially if your site is of limited value and has no brand equity built up), but if your site has many legitimate signs of quality I doubt Google is going to do much to try to undermine your market position if you boost your exposure a bit using ReviewMe or other similar services.

Any link that is not bought or sold through Google is inheranlty bad, no matter how much editorial discression and relevancy is associated with the ad.

Any link that is bought or sold through Google is inherently good, even if there is no editorial discression and the ad is on autogenerated spam content. And if the quality score is not high enough it is reasonable for Google to just charge more for irrelevancy, even if the ad promotes shady stuff.

I do believe ReviewMe is a good platform Aaron. The only problem I have is with the criteria to do reviews. My SEO blog (blog.madisonseo.com) is relatively new, therefore it doesn't have a high Alexa score. However, I have a BS in Computer Science, an MS in Computer Information Systems, and over 10 years experience as a lead programmer and DBA. So, while my resume would lead you to think I could provide some great analysis and insight, the Alexa rank of my Blog does not.

Now, I understand that one of the major selling points is that these reviews will end up on highly (Alexa) ranked blogs, therefore leading to more exposure, traffic, etc. That is a side affect I'm guessing - not the explicit intention of ReviewMe. Another side affect is probably the traffic the reviewer gets from the actual reading of the review (as you have done above). The rich get richer there.

So, might I post something on my blog such as "Please >> Review Me << (my blog) so I can join ReviewMe?" I would post to every Digg type site out there, my Alexa score would (probably) rise, and I could then pass the criteria allowing me to do reviews - and make some money on the side ;-)

And the reality of it is, even if Google filtered your ability to pass outbound PageRank, it still wouldn't hurt your site directly, would it?

And is Google going to filter 10,000 popular blogs?

Eventually they have to count something. They can't filter everything. Every time they try to filter stuff they have a less comprehensive web graph.

And also keep in mind that Google doesn't add nofollow to links to themselves when they give you a search box for your site. And they don't request the use of nofollow when they buy ads or sponsor events.

Why do Google apologists feel the need to defend Google when the hypocrisy and self-serving advice is so blatant?

Google's only concern is the passing of authority so if you pay multiple people to review your "internet marketing glossary" and there is no link condom it boosts all the phrases within high in Google. Aaron Wall then becomes the owner of all phrases related to internet marketing via "pay per post".

If they chose not to review it there is no transaction. If they don't link or use nofollow then it can't be considered a link buy. I probably wouldn't be interested in paying money to have people flame me.

So, given those options, clearly there is going to be some editorial filtering in even debating what I would ask to have reviewed, and then only some reviewers will accept.

If a person reviews my stuff and is willing to put their credibility on the review then the real risk is not SERPs or PageRank...the hardest thing to build online is build credibility / authority / attention. That is where the value is. Rankings are just a rough proxy or representation of that value.

Mr. Pratt - Take a look at this post from SEOmoz - representatives from the major search engines weighed in on this issue at a SES Q&A session just 10 days ago. The latest word seems to be that the SEs have no plans to penalize quality blogs that post occasional paid reviews.

Aaron (Pratt) - I've read the article you refer to (although your link was broken). It seems to be specifically referring to paid (or non-earned) links, and I believe ReviewMe doesn't quite fall into that category, although it's certainly a gray area. Since ReviewMe advertisers don't get to specify whether the reviews they pay for include links (nofollowed or not), they aren't technically buying links. A reviewer could choose to nofollow or not link at all if they have a negative opinion of the service they're writing on, so in a sense any links are still earned. Not entirely natural, perhaps, but not strictly "paid links" either.

Considering the article from SEOmoz that I referenced specifically addresses paid reviews, rather than the much broader category of paid links, I think it's more relevant to this particular discussion. For the moment, I don't believe the search engines are particularly concerned about paid reviews, and they've plainly indicated that they have no plans to penalize those who use them on occasion.

jack- I'm not sure who your question was addressed to, but for the record I have posted one paid review using the ReviewMe service, and I have no other connection with ReviewMe or Aaron Wall.

Kevin: In that post Matt Cutts from Google says the following (hrm, I missed that one):

"Just to chime in and expand on Adam's comment: Google wants to do a good job of detecting paid links. Paid links that affect search engines (whether paid text links or a paid review) can cause a site to lose trust in Google."

Wow, I think that Aaron and Aaron have succeeded in one of the most exciting blog conflicts that I can remember, and shout outs to the peanut gallery for their contributions.

You both have very valid points, even without the mine is bigger comments. PayPerPost should be considered, like any marketing with a price tag, as a form of buzz. I think that if a marketer is looking at generating a buzz and they want the readers/users of a particular blog to know about them, then they should buy a post. However, it is the blogger who risks his/her reputation (because that is what is for sale). Celebrities do it all the time.

My personal opinion:
Marketer - If this is the audience is who you want to speak to, buy it. If you get rank for it, great, if not, oh well.
Blogger - If this is how you make your pay, do it. If your image is tarnished, oh well, you got what you wanted.

How interesting to come across this debate today. I just had an email debate with my business partner and co-author, Jennifer Grappone, on the same subject. She was somewhat taken aback at the idea of Reviewme (which I was considering for a client), while the possibility of it being an ethical or "hat color" problem really hadn't occurred to me (which, as an aside, is one reason it's great to have a business partner - you get another perspective!).

It seems to me that the biggest potential problem in Reviewme is that the quality of the blogs might be subpar - and get lower with paid reviews. A couple that I looked at were just horrendous. Others that I looked at were clearly high-quality blogs.

But what doesn't seem a concern (to me) is the idea of paying per post. Isn't that just what any company that pays an employee to maintain a blog is doing? Isn't that basically what any commercial enterprise that spends money creating a website is doing? Is there some law that all content on the internet must be non-commercial? And blogs - for better or worse - are really not the same type of "objective" entity that the mainstream media attempts to be. Blogs, it seems to me, are all about the credibility & expression of the author. if the author chooses to dilute his or her credibility with paid content, that's really his or her choice. I would certainly hope that he or she would disclose the fact of the sponsorship, but again, that's his or her choice. Am I crazy?

Whether you like it or not, Google will continue to develop ways of detecting rank manipulation scams. Thank Googlers their detection algorithms are still in the stone age and the process in some cases still requires a manual review.

It's a waste of time to debate whether or not Google's intensions are hypocritical. Google isn't going to back away from this just because a few gray hats are bitching.

Time is better spent fine-tuning ways of staying under Google's radar.

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